Recently at our Cisco Live user event, I had the opportunity to talk to many IT organizations about managing and maintaining their data center environment, and the common theme I heard time and again was “how do I get the most value for my existing data center investments?”

It became evident that many IT organizations didn’t build out their data center strategy with an end-to-end hardware and software strategy, but rather purchased numerous point products along the way and are trying to manage their environments as efficiently as possible on top of heterogeneous hardware and multiple element managers.

The good news is that Cisco’s UCS Director can manage their end-to-end infrastructure including multiple element managers and heterogeneous systems – across compute, storage, network, and hypervisor – from a single pane of glass. And if they’re deploying integrated infrastructure systems like Vblock Systems, FlexPod, or VSPEX, the out-of-the-box support provided by Cisco UCS Director ensures faster provisioning processes, greater operational efficiency, and lower costs.

As evidenced in some of our recent case studies below – UCS Director is providing massive financial and time savings through unified infrastructure automation. Here are some of the things these three customers are saying about the benefits they’ve experienced with UCS Director:

“The effects of Cisco UCS Director have been enormous. Teams spend half as much time deploying environments. NESIC looked at other options for automated management tools for virtual environments, but only Cisco UCS Director could manage both virtual and physical environments.”

Cisco’s award winning converged infrastructure management software solution just got even better! In the latest release of Cisco UCS Director, we’ve added broader and deeper infrastructure support across the compute, network, storage and virtualization layers, as well making the product even more scalable. The latest release also comes with new software development kits (SDKs) for partners to provide extensibility and interoperability and a northbound API for integration with Cisco’s Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) as well as other cloud management systems. Let’s take a closer look at these enhancements in detail.

SDKs and APIs

UCS Director’s new SDKs and APIs were recently made available to give our partners the following functionality:

Northbound API which integrates into higher platforms like Cisco IAC. This API enables you to perform operations on Cisco UCS Director resources and to integrate those operations into applications so that they can provide API-supported functionality and features.

SDK available on cisco.com & DevNet (CDN), which provides open automation for partners looking to create new device connector

Open and flexible system, providing multi-vendor IT infrastructure management

Turnkey solution, quick time-to-value via setup within an hour

Out-of-the-box support for the most widely deployed converged and integrated infrastructure systems: Vblock, FlexPod, and VSPEX

Cisco’s unified management approach reduces deployment times from weeks to minutes – for either virtual or bare-metal environments

Automate your infrastructure management so that your staff can focus on more important business-critical initiatives instead of mundane manual tasks

But don’t just take our word for it. Check out a live technical demo and see for yourself the value and benefits that UCS Director can bring by automating your converged infrastructure. We are currently offering morning and afternoon sessions on December 11th, December 17th and January 14th.

There is a lot of buzz in the market about Cisco Cloupia and how it is
positioned relative to other Cisco solutions such as Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud. The term cloud is often used interchangeably for automated infrastructure provisioning as well as for true clouds, as mentioned in my previous blog. To better understand where these solutions should play in your data center’s cloud journey, I offer the following explanation.

Historically, to keep pace with the growth of business applications and the data they generate, IT infrastructure resources were deployed in a silo-like configuration. One set of resources was devoted to one particular computer technology, business application or line of business. These resources were not always optimized and could not be reconfigured or shared to support varying workloads. Read More »

Some of the individuals posting to this site, including the moderators, work for Cisco Systems. Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors, not of Cisco. The content is provided for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement or representation by Cisco or any other party. This site is available to the public. No information you consider confidential should be posted to this site. By posting you agree to be solely responsible for the content of all information you contribute, link to, or otherwise upload to the Website and release Cisco from any liability related to your use of the Website. You also grant to Cisco a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable (including rights to sublicense) right to exercise all copyright, publicity, and moral rights with respect to any original content you provide. The comments are moderated. Comments will appear as soon as they are approved by the moderator.